Courtesy of Ms. France Francois
AU asked me to write an op-ed on Haiti's recent quake for our department:
Relief. Renew. Rebuild.
By: France Francois
As the news coverage of Haiti wanes, Haiti should not ever again be reduced to a talking point: “The poorest nation in the Western hemisphere”. The millions of members of the Haitian Diaspora here in the U.S. only know it by one catch phrase: home. Thus, there are no words that I know of that can vividly capture the emotion I felt when word of the earthquake in Haiti reached me. Even the Creole word shagren which is used to describe a sorrow so deep that it causes one to wither away, cannot properly capture the feeling I felt at that moment. Stunned, I pulled the car over to the side of the road to digest what I’d just been told. Suddenly, I felt like the weight of more than 200 years of freedom, triumph, and tribulation pressing down on my chest. I felt inexplicably endangered; as if, by the stroke of a pen or the stirring of a strong wind, all my people were dying.
